Thank you, honourable Chair.
Thank you all for your work, which is really important.
I will speak English, but I wanted to start by greeting you with "bonjour".
I really come to you not only as an expert in threat assessment and trauma response but also as a citizen and a community member in Canada. I really thank you for your work and this important conversation.
The Center for Trauma Informed Practices is a Canadian organization that works with multidisciplinary professionals, starting with our police officers, our probation officers and a lot of mental health workers. We train many folks across Canada—it's 70,000, to give an estimate right about now—in really understanding the importance of having a collaborative approach to determining the issue of risk and risk assessment.
The words “risk assessment” come with really a lot of interpretation, and we're asking the committee to consider having a little more of a collaborative approach around our definition of risk assessment and the data the courts are using to make informed decisions around repeat offenders, etc.
Our models are very much situated to fit into this conversation, to provide professionals with data-based decision-making, and to use multisectoral data assessments to make decisions around what we would refer to as the IOC—the individual of concern.
Inside this conversation, what I would also just observe in our work.... Our research is based on about 45,000 cases of what we would determine as moderate- to high-risk cases where there is a risk of violence or a risk to public safety, spanning from youth—school-aged children—to adults in some communities as well.
One of the limitations in the work and in doing collaborative work and really determining risk is the ability for professionals to share information among themselves. Again, it's an invitation to look at some of the legislation around what we can say among professionals to determine risk. There are some challenges inside of that, and I want to be clear when I present that I'm talking about when there is a clear, direct and plausible threat to public safety. The legislation does allow people to share information, but too often it doesn't occur.
I'm speaking to my police colleagues a lot of times. I'm in Toronto right now, doing some work with them. The other limitation I hear in practice from my colleagues is when searchability becomes an issue. We may have a lot of ideas around risk and dangerousness, where a weapon might be held in a room or somewhere, and our police are struggling to be able to even execute exigent circumstances in the Criminal Code.
Therefore, I'm asking—on their behalf in a lot of ways, and based on 45,000 cases—that you maybe have a look at those kinds of restrictions that are placed around determining risk and dangerousness.
Inside the work we do, we differentiate between risk assessment and determining if someone is dangerous. What often happens—and what we've been observing—is that sometimes the decisions made around bail are based on criminal history and not history of violence. Somebody can have a history of criminality and actually be at moderate risk in terms of being dangerous.
However, there sometimes can be situations where somebody has basically never had a history of criminality but is extremely dangerous. The litmus paper test for maybe a bail restraint or a condition around bail is generally focused on a history of criminality, so the information we would provide the courts goes beyond a history of criminality. We looked at a concept. I don't have time to train everyone, of course, with five minutes, but it's the concept of a baseline.
On the concept of somebody's baseline, somebody who's engaging in pathways to violence, is there a typical pathway to violence? The rule in our work is that, if they've shifted in their pathway, if they've switched their target selection, then there are higher levels of dangerousness and risk based on what they're doing.
I know I'm running out of time, but I do want to share with you—and I heard it before from some of my colleagues—that the need for collaborative work in communities is something that we see and that we do well at CTIP. We have over 500 protocols in this country where multidisciplinary professionals work together—